Birth is Not A Learning Experience

Birth is not a learning experience for others.

Birth is about you, and your baby, and creating the optimal conditions for the transformation you and your child will enact together.

Resist the urge to invite people to your birth as a “gift” to your sister, or to teach your friend that home birth is safe, or to prove to your mother than you can do it.

I can relate to the desire to use my births as an opportunity to educate others, or to give others the benefit of having a chance to witness physiological birth.

Over the years though, I have come to realize that that urge, for me, was both selfish, and a form of self-denial, and ultimately based in my ego’s desire for validation.

This approach is highly counterproductive.

My births that involved this desire to educate others through allowing them to observe me ended up being far less satisfactory than my births where I truly centred my and my baby's biological and primal need for quiet, the absence of observation, and minimal interference.

And I've seen similar results in hundreds of other births.

Birth is not a performance, and yet the state of birth politics and social media have bolstered this notion of birth as performative.

Party births can certainly work for some women, but I encourage everyone to interrogate the underlying emotional and psychological rationale behind wanting to invite a large group of people, or even that one person, into your intimate space.

Consider only inviting someone to be present with you as you give birth, or free birth, whose motivations you know to be service--not curiosity, or voyeurism, or study, or energetic vampirism.

Give *yourself* the gift of radically protecting the exquisite, singular, and incomparable catalyst that is birth. Be selfish and be smart about your freebirth.